


when we are done sufficiently torturing ourselves

by twoif



Series: flash fics [4]
Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Bullshitting About Burnish Science, Gen, Pre-Canon, Revisionist History
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:00:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21769528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twoif/pseuds/twoif
Summary: When Aina, Galo, and Lio eventually find Dr. Prometh's lab under more than five feet of ice and talk to his computer-uploaded brain, Dr. Prometh will tell them that everything Foresight Research Industries developed and sold was his research, and that Kray Foresight just stole it after his untimely death.Which will not be the 100% accurate truth, but when you are sending out a few hot-headed teenagers in a test model robot that has never been piloted, you don't really have the time to quibble with the details.
Series: flash fics [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1525010
Comments: 4
Kudos: 29





	when we are done sufficiently torturing ourselves

**Author's Note:**

> original prompt: 500-1000 words / past tense / draw the line. title cribbed from the play, "when we have sufficiently tortured each other," which i have not seen, but damn that is one fine title.

Two things happened to Kray Foresight after he discovered he was a Burnish. The first, immediately, was that he lost his arm. It is not typical for the first flare-up to result in physical harm. Most Burnish come out of it unscathed, in no small part because being a Burnish means your body automatically regenerates. But Kray's power was, and has always been, so strong, and even in that instant of transition, long before he realized he had become the enemy, he was so intent on rejecting the mutation that his body turned on itself. For a brief moment, his body suppressed the flare so hard that it considered his arm a foreign entity, and burned it up just as if it were someone else. And when the Promare took over, when he finally transformed, it was like the arm had never been there at all. He had been reborn in fire, and that body had no left hand. 

The second thing was that Kray became a researcher in Dr. Prometh's lab. He had already been aiming to go into science, though not in the specific Burnish-related specialty. Afterwards, it seemed like destiny, or a curse he couldn't throw off, which both amounted to the same thing, really. His coworkers and classmates all told him he had a special knack. "I was chosen," he would tell them, which wasn't a lie. He rose in the ranks until he was Dr. Prometh's right hand. And then, eventually, he was both hands, and the head. He rebranded the lab as Foresight Research Industries and, eventually, the Foresight Foundation. The rest is, as they say, history.

Self-hate, Kray knows, is powerful. It took his previous life away, but then gave him a new one, one larger still despite his diminished body. At some point self-hate becomes so powerful it circles back around to self-love, a devouring obsession with the parts of yourself that you want to cut off. What that point is, is different for everyone. 

What that point is, for Kray, was the Promare. 

*

When Aina, Galo, and Lio eventually find Dr. Prometh's lab under more than five feet of ice and talk to his computer-uploaded brain, Dr. Prometh will tell them that everything Foresight Research Industries developed and sold was his research, and that Kray Foresight just stole it after his untimely death.

Which will not be the 100% accurate truth, but when you are sending out a few hot-headed teenagers in a test model robot that has never been piloted, you don't really have the time to quibble with the details.

Dr. Prometh remembered, and would go on to recount, the incident that ended his life as being solely about the Promatech engine, that him sealing the research on the Promatech engine and development of Deus Ex Machina was the reason Kray shot him. But if Kray were to upload his own brain onto a computer and show a movie reel, he'd show the years leading up to it. Dr. Prometh was a genius, but had the faults of a genius, a monomaniacal brain that only ever wanted to understand why. Why did Burnish flare burn differently than real fire? Why were the Burnish immune to their own heat? Why was the temperature of the planet slowly going up? 

Kray was monomaniacal, but in a different way. He had been barely two years old when the Great World Blaze swept through. He had never lived in a world where order had not been achieved by defeating the Burnish. So what was the use of learning "why" if what you really need to know is "how"? How do we prevent the Great World Blaze from happening again? How can we control the Burnish? 

How do we leave behind the body that shackles us to our fate, that makes us hated, that will reduce us one day to not even a corpse, but a pile of white ash blowing away into nothingness? 

By which Kray meant, the planet, and his own body. Both, he thought, sickened by the Promare. 

*

The point is, much of the research that made Foresight Industries famous was based on Dr. Prometh's research, but with practical applications invented by Kray. He had been the one to turn them into marketable products that could be used in Burning Rescue squads across the world. Kray knew that the Burnish were not just mutants who shot fire out of their hands, that they were channels for an extraterrestrial force. But what difference did it make? People died one way or another. If Kray could not control his own body, he would control the bodies of others. For the Burnish, he would keep them from burning, unless he wanted them to. For those who were not, he would keep them from dying—unless he needed them to. 

And even still, there is one invention that has been Kray and Kray's alone: the instant-freeze bullet. 

Kray was there when the very first instant-freeze bullet rolled out of the assembly line. It was presented to him slightly ceremonially, and he joked about putting it in a place of importance, like an atrium in the Foresight Tower. Instead, he gave it to Biar. 

"There will come a time when I might encounter a situation beyond my control," he told her when he put it in her hand. "When that time comes, I want you to shoot me with this."

In that moment, Biar probably thought he had meant, _one day the Burnish might find me. They may burn me up, and in that moment, I want you to put me out of misery._ And it will be much later, after the fighting and the shouting and the almost apocalypse, before Biar will realize that that hadn't been Kray's meaning. Unlike the cuffs made for Burnish detention or flare-resistant aqueous film forming foam, the instant-freeze bullet does not build ice around a heat signal. Rather, it detects any cells communicating with the Promare and turned those cells into ice. One by one, the instant-freeze bullet cuts off the body's ability to channel the Promare's power of regeneration. Left to fester, it will replace the entire body until there is nothing but a block of ice in a human shape.

In other words, a death sentence.

Dr. Prometh invented for understanding; the Foresight Foundation, for prevention, for reduction, for control. But the instant-freeze bullet was invented for one thing only: total eradication. It was a technology only someone like Kray would make, or understand.

**Author's Note:**

> when i was a kid we walked uphill both ways barefoot in the snow and it was also ok to write a fic that was literally just 1k of pointless gen worldbuilding. sometimes i miss those days. 
> 
> disclaimer: i am not a kray apologist, but i also feel like i would have enjoyed the movie so much more if there was more backstory/nuance to kray's genocidal tendencies. like, i still want him to be a bad person, but a more interesting bad person. so, here we are. 
> 
> you can find me on twitter at mudasquared. burn on, space cowboy.


End file.
